{"id":1808,"date":"2015-04-11T11:37:36","date_gmt":"2015-04-11T11:37:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/?p=1808"},"modified":"2015-04-11T11:46:18","modified_gmt":"2015-04-11T11:46:18","slug":"raspberry-pi-weather-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/?p=1808","title":{"rendered":"Raspberry Pi Weather Station"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently put my Maplin weather station back online, feeding data to wunderground.com. \u00a0This is a live object that links to the site to show the current local weather conditions:<\/p>\n<p><object width=\"600\" height=\"400\"><param name=\"movie\" value=\"http:\/\/www.wunderground.com\/swf\/Rapid_Fire.swf?units=metric&amp;station=IOLDGORE2\" \/><embed src=\"http:\/\/www.wunderground.com\/swf\/Rapid_Fire.swf?units=metric&amp;station=IOLDGORE2\" type=\"application\/x-shockwave-flash\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>I bought mine from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.maplin.co.uk\/p\/black-usb-wireless-touchscreen-weather-centre-n96gy?gclid=CjwKEAjwjKOpBRChjsTyicbFy3QSJADP1gTN2Ke8Ckm9QIaMIG_YisXnSCGljLvdc5oG-FgwrMHmMBoCeQTw_wcB\">Maplin<\/a>, where it is currently \u00a399.99, however\u00a0it is often substantially discounted during their sales. \u00a0It includes an outside station that measures wind strength and direction, temperature and humidity, linking wirelessly to a master unit with a large touchscreen LCD (fairly clear but not the best contrast) that has a USB port to connect to a computer.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\" aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/images.maplinmedia.co.uk\/black-usb-wireless-touchscreen-weather-centre.jpg?w=283&amp;h=283&amp;r=4&amp;o=VzHiS1QoMRFwkdDuWoRGzxvoS70j&amp;V=B9WD\" alt=\"\" width=\"283\" height=\"283\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The supplied software is ugly, unreliable and doesn&#8217;t do very much; it&#8217;s really not even worth the bother of installing. \u00a0Instead, I strongly recommend either using Cumulus of Pywws.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/sandaysoft.com\/products\/cumulus\">Cumulus<\/a>\u00a0is the simpler option. \u00a0It&#8217;s a Windows program and installs in a few seconds. \u00a0Configuration is easy via some setup screens where you can tell it what weather station you have, and what internet uploads to perform (e.g. to wunderground, APRS). \u00a0I ran this for a few days it worked very well. \u00a0The UI is quite nice and the software didn&#8217;t crash, though I did have to restart it once or twice when it lost contact with the weather station (I&#8217;m pretty sure this is a &#8220;feature&#8221; of some of these stations).<\/p>\n<p>Running Cumulus continuously (do it uploads live data) does of course mean having a Windows PC on all the time. \u00a0This in turn means converting money into heat which you might not want to do especially in the summer months. \u00a0For both these reasons I turned to a solution that I could install on a Raspberry Pi.<\/p>\n<p>I followed <a href=\"http:\/\/weather.dragontail.co.uk\/index.php?page=station_setup\">these excellent instructions<\/a>\u00a0to install <a href=\"http:\/\/pythonhosted.org\/pywws\/en\/html\/guides\/getstarted.html\">pywws<\/a>\u00a0on a spare Raspberry Pi. \u00a0This needs to be a model B or B+ or V2 B, because it needs a USB port to connect to the weather station plus an internet connection (LAN or second USB for wireless LAN).<\/p>\n<p>pywws can upload data periodically to your own web site for viewing, but I prefer to have it upload data live to wunderground.com. \u00a0To do this you need to create an account there (free), add the position of your weather station, and then enter the account details into the pywws weather.ini file. \u00a0Once it&#8217;s all working, wunderground.com will show live and historic data from your station:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/live.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-1810\" src=\"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/live-1024x383.jpg\" alt=\"live\" width=\"640\" height=\"239\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/live-1024x383.jpg 1024w, http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/live-300x112.jpg 300w, http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/live.jpg 1189w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/plot.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1811\" src=\"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/plot.jpg\" alt=\"plot\" width=\"683\" height=\"389\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/plot.jpg 683w, http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/04\/plot-300x171.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 683px) 100vw, 683px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve recently put my Maplin weather station back online, feeding data to wunderground.com. \u00a0This is a live object that links to the site to show the current local weather conditions: I bought mine from Maplin, where it is currently \u00a399.99, however\u00a0it is often substantially discounted during their sales. \u00a0It includes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1808"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1814,"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1808\/revisions\/1814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.daveakerman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}